


Pay Your Respects

by Zelos



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-28
Updated: 2015-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-23 19:06:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4888519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zelos/pseuds/Zelos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wasn’t sure who he was grieving for anymore.</p><p>Jake, and the leadup to Saddler’s funeral.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pay Your Respects

**Author's Note:**

> For alliecat-person. Thank you for everything.

Jake’s father was in the living room, so hunched over that he was in half. The muted TV played in the background, flickering images that no one was paying attention to. It was so quiet in the house that one would think there was a death in this household. Even Homer was subdued. Death loomed over them all, and they weren’t even the _avelim_.

Jake has known—and caused—many deaths, but this hit harder than most, not only because it was personal. Since they entered the war, the Animorphs had never had a chance to grieve the losses, from their hands or others’. Having the space, the permission, to grieve was a terrible, guilty relief.

“Dad?” It came out as a whisper. As if by magic, Tom appeared behind him, making Jake jump.

Their father looked up and forced a smile. “Boys. You…you two okay?”

Tom paused, then settled on a short nod. “Yeah.”

Jake hesitated a moment, then pushed past his brother to sit on the carpet, halfway in between his father and brother. Tom, looking too tall for his age, crossed his arms and leaned against the doorway.

Steve heaved a sigh, face as blank as the pad of paper on his knees. “Your aunt and uncle…they asked me to speak a little about Saddler at the funeral. I said yes, of course,” _I couldn_ _’t say no_ hung in the air, “but honestly I…don’t know what to say.” A beat of guilty silence. “Our families haven’t spent that much time together as of late, and I…I wish…”

It slipped out before Jake could stop himself: “we can help.”

Two sets of eyes stared at him, one hopeful, one skeptical. “We can?” Tom said.

Their father brightened slightly. “Yeah…you kids spent time together, didn’t you? Not so much now, but you did. Didn’t you all go up for that camping trip a few years back?”

“You mean the one where Saddler left Jake in the woods as a joke and I had to go find him with a flashlight?” Tom supplied dryly. “The one where I practically carried Jake back to camp, covered in bug bites and poison ivy?”

“ _Tom_ ,” Steve sounded pained.

“He was brave,” Jake interrupted softly, his voice distant and faraway. “Braver than we gave him credit for.”

Tom stared at Jake as if he had lost his mind.

Jake smiled weakly. “You’d have to be brave, right, if you lost everything but got another chance at life? To take that chance and look forward, despite everything that had happened?”

Tom’s face softened and he gave a slight nod.

Jake pulled his knees to his chest, remembering narrowed, shrewd brown eyes so dissimilar to Saddler’s own. “He was resourceful. Smart too.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Tom allowed grudgingly. “Remember when…”

  

Dressing up was foreign to Jake. Rachel seemed to have a genetic, even supernatural, predisposition to fashion; she not only made everything look good without effort, she was well ahead of the fashion curve. She didn’t just predict what would go in style, she _made_ style.

That was one gene Jake did not share with his cousin. After the fourth attempt at strangling himself with his tie, he sought help and better hands. “Mom?”

Jean Berenson looked up from needlessly smoothing the creases in her black dress. “Oh, Jake.” She knelt down in front of him and plucked the black tie from his helpless fingers, drawing it around his neck and tying it in quick, deft movements. Then she started neatening the rest of him, pulling at invisible creases in his suit and flicking at the fall of his bangs.

Jake ducked his head. “Thanks, Mom.”

“You’re welcome.” Jean paused in her ministrations and gave him with a thin, watery smile. “You look very…very…” she faltered, lips trembling. Perhaps it was bad form to compliment him on his dress when the occasion was such a terrible one.

Jake smiled back, his expression as weak as hers. “Thanks, Mom.”

Without warning, she hugged him tightly, crushing the breath from his lungs. “ _Jake._ _”_ She was crying now, voice hitching against his neck. _“_ My little boy.”

Jake closed his eyes. “I’m here, Mom. I’m right here.”

“It w-wasn’t _you._ ” Her voice cracked. “I’m glad…it wasn’t you.”

“Yeah.” Jake thought of a lion’s yellow fangs on his neck and hugged his mother back. “Me too.”

 

Saddler’s funeral was scheduled to be almost two weeks after his death. They’d lost a few days before the hospital staff finally found the body, and then lost several more at the behest of the coroner and police due to the suspicious circumstances. Saddler went to the _chevra kadisha_ in pieces; no one, living or dead, could fall down an elevator shaft and still look pretty.

The last funeral he’d been to was for Marco’s mom. Jake thought another funeral before he was twenty was far too soon.

The eulogies were short and singularly positive. They sounded like they were talking about another person, even as Jake recognized the parts he contributed.  It said quite a lot that Jake couldn’t tell whether the words were falsely generic or if he’d never known his cousin. _Kind. Warm spirit_. _Loving son, loving brother._ Jake remembered Saddler as the kid who’d mow down other kids with his bike while laughing.

“ _Al molay rachamim, shochayn bam_ _’romim, ham-tzay m’nucha n’chona…_ ”

Eventually Aunt Ellen and Uncle George would probably sue the hospital; after all, patients should not disappear mid-way to surgery and die at the bottom of an elevator shaft (even though there wasn’t anything the hospital staff could’ve done). The PR would be terrible, the settlement would be huge.

None of that would bring Saddler back.

_Now those nice people have their son back. So what are you going to do about it?_

If David hadn’t been hell-bent on destroying the Animorphs, Jake wasn’t sure if he would’ve stopped David—and Saddler—from having another chance at living. Things would’ve been easier in some respects. Of course, it was _wrong_ , but it could’ve also been—cruelly, ironically— _kind_ in its own way. David might’ve convinced him. Maybe.

Maybe that said too much about him, too.

Rachel sat in the second pew, a pointed reminder that her immediate family was excluded from the rest after her parents’ divorce. She sat in between Sarah and Jordan, one hand clasped in each of theirs, her back ramrod straight. Aunt Naomi and Uncle Dan bookended their children, faces pale and hands shaking.

Jake caught Rachel’s eyes. Even across the distance, her blue eyes pierced him. Jake hastily looked away.

He mumbled alongside the rabbi’s words: “ _ba-avur shenodvu tz_ _’dakah, b’ad hazkarat nishmata,”_ tripping over the syllables as he went. Jake hasn’t been a particularly observant Jew and he couldn’t remember the last time he went to the synagogue, but he’d picked up prayer again after the war had started. During late nights, bad nights when it was more effort to sleep than stay awake, he’d whisper hollow words to a God he wasn’t sure existed, much less listened. It started as a hope that his brother could be saved; nowadays, it was simply a prayer that anyone left would still be worth saving.

<Does it help?> Tobias once asked him. He didn’t have an answer.

On days like this, nothing did.

_“Ado-nay Hu na-chalatah, v’tanu-ach b’shalom al mishkavah.”_

Jake thought of a little white rat on a tiny, desolate island, alone but for his despair. He thought of David’s flash of vulnerability in the school cafeteria; he thought of Saddler’s corpse in the coffin, carefully wrapped in _tachrichim_.

He thought of David’s parents, who’d never know David’s fate. He thought about all three of them, and their fates worse than death. He tried not to think about who was left to grieve any of them.

And most of all, he thought of Rachel. Rachel at the hospital, Rachel at the Taco Bell, Rachel in David’s final moments. Betrayal-rage-horror-hatred crystallizing into love as she drove them all off, protecting them with her body and courage and shards of her bloodstained soul.

He wished he could say he was sorry. He wasn’t sure he knew what that meant anymore. Guilt and hatred mingled into a lead ball in his stomach. He thought he might be sick.

A hand slid into his and squeezed; Jake looked up into Tom’s face. The expression on Tom’s face was perfect: two parts sombre to three parts heartsore. His mouth quirked in a wan, rueful smile, familiar from the bygone years and a lifetime ago.

Times like this Jake could almost believe that this was his brother, not an alien wearing his brother’s skin. The real Tom was a despairing ghost in his own head, his body a sack of meat to be worn and tossed as the Yeerks saw fit.

This wasn’t his brother, just a Yeerk playing a part—and playing it well at that. But Jake was a killer wearing the face of a teenage boy, so who was he to judge on the scale of liars and cheats and fakes? And Tom’s Yeerk was a good actor if nothing else. Right now, that would have to be enough.

Jake leaned his head on the shoulder of the monster with his brother’s face. He wasn’t sure who he was grieving for anymore: Saddler, David, the victims of the war, the souls of his friends. Himself.

Tom reached over and pulled him into a one-armed hug, and both alien and boy pretended they didn’t notice Jake’s tears dampening Tom’s shirt.


End file.
